Physical Meetup in Sydney

From Lesswrongwiki

The meetup group in Sydney has been active since January 2014. It has a facebook group hereThe facebook group; several kinds of meetups and is very friendly. Over time we have grown to fill the interest of several meetings a month of several types. It's worth being clear that this happened naturally, rather than us enforcing a plan to grow.

Types of meetups

Sydney LessWrong coordinates or participates in 6 main types of meetups;

Pub chat

Focused Dojo

Active social

Inactive social

Online hangout

Australia wide LessWrong camp

Details of the next meetup can be found in our facebook group (as this is the easiest to co-ordinate) facebook does not make groups visible without a facebook account, but the event's details are duplicated on Lesswrong on the Meetups page. We often post event summaries post-event in the facebook group. Contact Lesswrong user Elo if you want access to the information without having to make a facebook account.

Pub chat

At the time of writing (mid 2015), the group meets up at the City of Sydney RSL, 565 George St, Sydney. On the 4th Wednesday of the month from 6:30pm. When we started these were our first kind of meetup and they remain in solid attendance. (They are also always fun) These lead to good conversation and interesting ideas.

Through our first year the organisers chose a topic as an "attractor" to participants with a keen interest in these areas; some of these include;

health - (Mental, Physical, food, sleep)

organisation systems that we use

finance (of particularly low attendance)

productivity

community growth

"What is the most useful thing you can convey in a short sentence?" where the winning result was "you can learn practical skills by watching youtube videos on how to do them".

These began to become ineffective at attracting people individually as they looked at the topic and personally decided they were not interested in it. Because of this - our pub chat is now topic-less and permits a free flow conversation about all topics (although we usually avoid politics)

Focused Dojo

These meetups were started up to mirror those held in Melbourne; In order to co-ordinate better for online meetups (which happen all around the country at once) they are run on the same day as the Melbourne Dojo. This has also led to several members interested in attending both events; and as a consequence we now record our Dojo sessions (see Physical Meetup in Sydney#Recordings).

Sessions are conducted by our members and usually start at 4pm at Humanist house (10 Shephard St, Sydney) and go until 6pm, after which we invite all participants who are available to join us for dinner nearby in any number of restaurants.

Some sessions we have run include:

Planning and debugging

time management

agency and sphexishness

goal setting, goal planning and goal factoring

practice and learning

(this list is incomplete)

Active meetups

Following on from many discussions of exercise for health and well-being; The organisers started running physically active meetups once every two months.

These have included:

a walk across the harbour bridge to a picnic

laser tag

sky-zone (trampoline park)

Future meetups will include:

a trip to the beach

ice skating

indoor rock climbing

Inactive social

These are intended to be social events and so far have included:

board games night

movie night

HPMOR wrap party

Solstice celebration event

Online hangouts

These events happen every 1-2 monthly; and have recently been co-ordinated by LessWrong Canberra; They are usually run on a Sunday evening from 7pm in an alternate week to the other meetups; and are intended as a general catch up with the rest of Australia. We have been visited by participants from Sydney; Melbourne; Canberra; Brisbane and South America.

Some questions we ask at this meetup include:

What have you learnt recently?

What are you working on?

What are some recent goals you have developed?

Australia Wide LessWrong Camp

The first Australia wide camp was run in 2014 and included 27 participants from Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, and was sold out. After that camp we set up the online hangouts to catch up with our friends in other cities. On camp; topics covered included CFAR ideas (as CFAR had recently run a camp in Melbourne), lightning talks; early morning walks; and Comfort Zone Expansion experiences.

Camp is planned for 2015 to be on the 17th-19th of July in Jindabyne. Planning progress is still underway. Tickets are on sale now (check the facebook group for details). The chosen venue has places for 40 participants and we look forward to selling out tickets again.

Recordings

LessWrong Sydney has a Chirbit account for our recorded events. They can be found here [1]

We currently record our Dojos (asking for consent first) and hope to record more of our discussions for fun and future adventures.

Active organisers

ELiot Redelman

Eliot has a hand in nearly every area imagine-able from Electronics; Alpacas; Marketing; Screen printing; Pole-dance; Chess; Ceramics; Improv, Quantified Self; Hat making; woodworking; Fish farming; cooking; programming; unicycling; juggling (and other circus skills); He is one of the 3 active organisers of LessWrong Sydney. Some wonder if he ever sleeps; and arguably - if you had or hadn't seen the sleep graphs - it is debatable that he does.

Taryn East

Taryn is an IT geek and medieval reenactor. One of the three main organisers of Less Wrong Sydney, she is known for her skills in making Mead, crafts and Ruby on Rails.